H2O.ai, an artificial-intelligence platform producer, is partnering with AI4ALL, an Oakland, CA-based nonprofit working to increase diversity and inclusion in AI and to educate future AI workers about how it can be a force for social good. The goal: to democratize AI.

A competition hosted by the NYU Tandon School of Engineering is challenging humans to create algorithms for producing adaptive settlements in Minecraft. (These are the villages and cities and other environments that players create at will in the online game.) The competition addresses a fairly new area of inquiry for machine learning in games: how to develop algorithms that can design rather than play.

For all the talk of technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics doing away with the human element in corporate life, well trained human beings are still an essential ingredient. In fact, if the current skills gap remains unplugged, by 2030 the world will see "tens of millions of unfilled jobs and trillions of dollars in unrealized revenue," according to a new study.

Nearly every app and service will incorporate some level of artificial intelligence in the next few years. Whether they're obviously intelligent or use intelligence behind the scenes, these tools "create a new intelligent intermediary layer between people and systems and have the potential to transform the nature of work and the structure of the workplace," according to a new trends forecast.

Expert shopping advisors and product recommendations will be the use case to see the fastest growth throughout the period, at 96.6 percent CAGR, with public safety and emergency response close behind at 96.2 percent and intelligent processing automation holding the third spot at 69.2 percent CAGR.

Teacher Advisor with Watson 1.0 uses artificial intelligence from Watson, IBM's Jeopardy!-playing robot, now trained by math experts with feedback from more than 1,000 math teachers, to help K-5 teachers with targeted math resources for their students.

Once again this school year, schools will be ramping up robotics programs and opening more makerspaces, according to the latest report from the New Media Consortium and the Consortium for School Networking.